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The Sask Party Wants to "Hamstring" the Crowns 

"Mr. Speaker, I want to be clear for the member opposite that yes, we will impose our views on the Crown corporations."
- CIC Minister Ken Cheveldayoff April 16, 2008

Brad Wall and the Sask Party are ideologically opposed to public ownership and would like to see Saskatchewan’s publicly owned Crown Corporations privatized. They said so at every opportunity right up until it cost them the 2003 provincial election.

Since then the Sask Party has hidden their crown privatization agenda but the introduction of their so-called “Sask First” Crowns policy in October of 2008 is very clearly the beginning of their attempt to do on the sly what they cannot do directly.

The “Sask First” Policy will force the Crowns to invest only within the province and then only when it does not compete with private business. Out of province investments are also out of bounds under the new policy. The Sask Party is selling off 8 such subsidiaries despite the fact that at least 6 are profitable and if left alone would provide substantial revenues to the province and help maintain their parent Crown on a sound financial footing.

The Star-Phoenix summed up the opinion of pretty much all observers when they said Sask First will “ham string the companies to the point that their long-term viability is put at risk.”(30/10/08)

“Won’t that [The Sask First Policy] turn every Crown into an STC… or a barely-profitable entity ripe for privatization?”
- Regina Leader Post, October 29 , 2008


Sask Party Misrepresent KPMG Report

"... the Saskatchewan Party government... justified its decision with the selective use of a report it commissioned from KPMG..."
- Saskatoon Star - Phoenix.: Oct 30, 2008

We need look no further than the Sask Party’s misuse and misrepresentation of a KPMG report to justify the Sask First policy to know they are up to no good.

The KPMG study was commissioned by the Sask Party at a cost of $250,000 and one of its conclusions was that yes, some out-of-province investments lost money. But it was old news about old investments.

It also needs to be noted that investments that did not work were limited to SaskTel and were made at a time when the utility was “getting hammered by deregulation and competition in the long-distance business and was desperately looking for new revenue streams to offset its losses…”
- Regina Leader Post: October 29, 2008

The Calvert government had already put an end to high-risk, out of province investments shortly after the 2003 election.

"Gone unmentioned by Mr. Cheveldayoff is the following observation on the KPMG report: 'We have concluded that strategic objectives were substantially or partially achieved on over 80 per cent of the investments.'"
- Saskatoon Star - Phoenix.: Oct 30, 2008

The report did reveal that 80% of active out-of-province investments were meeting or exceeding their targeted rate of return and that return on investment was 41.6%, which translated into 51 million dollars in profits for Saskatchewan people.

The Sask Party cherry-picked numbers from the KPMG report and used them to portray all out-of-province Crown investments in the worst possible light. These dubious methods provided the Sask Party with the rational they needed to inflict their restrictive Sask First policy on the Crowns.

KPMG must have been wary of how the Sask Party might use the report because it included this proviso:

"KPMG believes that its analyses must be considered as a whole and that selecting portions of the analyses or the factors considered by it, without considering all facts and analyses together, could create a misleading view of the process underlying our findings.”
- KMPG Report on the Crowns

Create a misleading view is exactly what the Sask Party did.

|  Crowns Home  |  Sask First Policy   |  What The Sask Party Said   |

|  Privatization by Stealth   |  What the Media is Saying  |
Trent Wotherspoon
Regina Rosemont
...

After the escape of six prisoners from the Regina Correctional Centre, the Sask Party denied the existence of gangs in Saskatchewan jails.

"It's not the most fun in the world and I can't say it's been the stellar week of my career but life goes on. (Gantefoer, after comments on the harmonized sales tax (HST) and on health user fees raised both as issues for the NDP and the media)"

- Minister of Finance, Rod Gantefoer

NDP's Lorne Calvert started province's economic growth...
January 8, 2010
But the actual transition from a "have-not" province (we've been a "have" province for six years now) to one leading the nation in economic growth was a five-year process that really started in the last three years of NDP premier Lorne Calvert's administration. -Murray Mandryk, Rosetown News